About a year ago, I found a good Craigslist deal on a Blue Yeti microphone and also recently bought a nice Logitech C920 Webcam. Up until now I have been using them with the typical Yeti desktp stand and placing my webcam on top of my monitor. However, I have been reading about some ways people “hack” Ikea products, especially their Tertial Lamp. The lamp, itself is pretty nice. It has a nice moveable arm so you can move the lamp around your desk area. Maybe next time I’m at Ikea, I’ll get one to use as a lamp too.

As for now, I picked up two when I was at Ikea a few days ago. I picked them up for the sole purpose of the Ikea hacks that I saw. I wanted to make both a microphone arm and an arm to move around my webcam. Of course, there is a lamp on these nice arms so first I had to remove that. Luckily it has a pretty useful mounting bracket that I could reuse. I removed the lamp part and power cord from both lamps I purchased for about $8.

For the webcam, I was digging through some of my old junk in the basement and found a mini tripod that came with a camera kit I got many moons ago. Perfect! I was probably going to throw this away anyway! I was able to take off the part that had the standard tripod screw and mount it right between the bracket on the tertial. I had to do a little drilling and modifications of the screw housing from the mini tripod, but it fit in like a champ.

My microphone looked like it may be a bit trickier, but very doable. First, I knew I would probably want a shock mount for the mic so there isn’t a bunch of sound if it bounces around. I looked these up to buy online, but most that said they would work with the Blue Yeti were at least $50. I’m too cheap for that! I took a run over to the local Menards and did some searching. I came back with a PVC coupler for about $1.15 and a package of small bungees for about $4. Again, I took the Dremel for some modifications to the PVC. I made some notches to keep the bungees in place and wrapped them around so they could hold the mic. Now I have a pretty decent DIY shock mount for my Blue Yeti Microphone. I was able to screw the bracket from the light onto this and it was attached to my Ikea lamp arm. Now, the mic and PVC is slightly heavy for the arm, so it won’t work in all positions, but I can get it in the right position for using at my desk. In the future, I may cut away some of the PVC to lighten it up and also paint it black to not stand out as much. But, for now it works great.

I figured this would give me a slightly nicer setup at my desk when I need audio and video for podcasting or video meetings. Take a look at the photos below.